Participating Yacht Clubs
25 leading yacht clubs, including Royal Yacht Squadron, Royal Hong Kong, Royal Swedish, YC Costa Smeralda, and YC de Monaco, enjoyed a superbly organised weekend of competition in Gstaad.

The format of the event is ski-racing under the floodlights on Friday evening. The top eight teams after skiing are given a bye to the quarter finals of the model yacht racing, which takes place the following morning at Gstaad’s indoor swimming pool.

Giant Slalom
On Friday night, as the sun started to set behind the mountains, we took the cable car to the top of Eggli Mountain for the skiing part of the event under floodlights. 82 competitors did two timed runs each of the giant slalom course. In this race, the fastest speed is not the determining factor. Instead, the aim is to complete both runs as close as possible in the same time. The individual with the smallest time difference between their runs wins, irrespective of speed.

RTYC new member Michela Auert won the individual prize overall (a cow bell!) with an extraordinary time difference of just 0.06 seconds between her two runs (which were also very fast). Overall, the RTYC team were 4th beating numerous more traditional ski nations, and qualifying us straight through to the quarter finals of the match racing.

A lively dinner in the mountain restaurant with a Swiss band followed.

Match Racing
On Saturday morning, we gathered at the swimming pool for match racing in America’s Cup remote controlled model yachts in wind generated by fans at one end. The light wind was patchy and variable across the windward-leeward course.

In the quarter finals, in a best-of-three match, RTYC beat RYS A team to go through to the semi-finals against RYS B team.

In the semi-final, after two races, it was one win each with RYS B narrowly beating RTYC in the closely fought third race.

RYS B went on to overall victory, defeating Bayerischer YC in the final. These two teams have been the winners between them over the last ten events so RTYC were competing with the best!

The event finished at the smart Gstaad YC clubhouse, with a fondue dinner and prize giving.

This was an excellent result for RTYC, with the skiers and match-racers both contributing to our official final position of Joint Runner-up.

Gstaad YC
Our thanks to the team at GYC for a very enjoyable and well organised event:
Cindy Schonrich Club Manager
Sandro Bolton Sports Committee Chairman
Dominic Toomey Sports Events Co-ordinator